Can you completely disable/ignore content shared by other users if you're playing against them online?

Yes, nothing shows up during actual gameplay.

You misinterpreted the question. If I don't want any video of my gameplay shared, but I'm playing against some kid who records and shares his uber-mad-leet skillz all the time, does his game not record the gameplay featuring me because of my preferences? I believe I'm SOL in that case and the footage of me gets shared against my wishes.

The only real downside I experienced is that the client will occasionally desync from the server, so your character will seem to be in another place than it really is. It doesn't happen too often, but it's an annoyance when it does

Early on, I had the same thoughts regarding the desync issues ("it's so rare, doesn't seem too bad"). However, as I progressed to higher difficulties with a lot more enemies on screen with a lot more going on, it got really bad. It's nice that there's a workaround if you suspect it's happening ('/oos' in the chat window), but on more than one occasion a boss/mob has murdered me while I was elsewhere in the map.

From what I've found online, it looks like it varied by state (I found that my own state enacted a law in mandating it around 2009). However, since late last year/early this year manufacturers have voluntarily been adding a bittering agent.

Then why do they keep removing all the heinous features everyone complains about?

They were very stubborn in their defense of the heinous features... until pre-orders opened up for both consoles. The PS4 was trouncing the X1, which likely was their "oh shit" moment. Since then, they've been slowly rolling back the features. I think it's too late to recoup the lost pre-order sales, but may save some face for sales down the road.

Of course, it's simply a matter of a lucky attacker choosing one of the "low priority fix" vulnerabilities as an attack vector and figuring out how to use it. Suddenly, that unfixed vulnerability made that difficult target into an easy one.

In terms of your analogy, the lock may be exceedingly difficult to pick until the thief realizes they can crawl into the open window on the second story. They just needed a ladder.

I completely blanked on the fact that you were talking about Ubuntu and not FreeBSD. Have you tried using the kFreeBSD kernel under the Ubuntu userland? I'm not sure how difficult it would be (looks like Ubuntu 10.04 had a package for it, but nothing newer).

After all, if I am innocent, then you have no logical reason to spy on me.

Perhaps you are innocent, but match a behavior profile just enough that they monitor you. What does the profile consist of? That's the beauty of secret programs - we don't know. For all we know, it gets modified to suit a purpose as needed.

A good approach to the problem I've seen is masking the password except for the last character entered, put a timeout on that character (5-10 seconds), then mask it too. It lets you see what you've typed in, and you're no more at risk than someone just watching you type the password.